First Technology Group has won Commercial Channel Partner of the Year from Microsoft at its 2020 South Africa Partner Awards.

The award is for a partner that develops modern, customer-focused services that leverage the Microsoft Cloud Platform and offer value-added deployment and management services.

“This year has seen significant changes in how we engage with clients across the three-cloud strategy,” says Jennifer Meggersee, software sales manager for First Technology National. “Microsoft’s solution assessments were key to the successful transformation and gave us the opportunity to optimise customer investments as part of our trusted IT advisor service.”

First Technology provides risk and maturity assessments as well as solutions assessments for customers that require licensing baselines.

“Our customers, particularly those in the public sector, want to know that they are compliant,” says Meggersee. “We have additionally extended availability of our Sara portal from managed service customers to all customers.”

First Technology’s Sara portal is a Web-based portal that gives customers visibility of their Microsoft estate. It reports licence entitlements, contract optimisation, makes reports viewable at any time, and reveals end of life and support road map indicators.

Collaboration

First Technology National collaborates with other First Technology Group companies such as Ascent Technology, BUI, Galdon, The CRM Team and FirstNet. Together with these companies, it offers database optimisation assessments and security service-level agreements, infrastructure optimisation assessments, FastTrack that helps Microsoft deployments, application development and analytics, cybersecurity assessments, Sentinel workshops, and Teams training workshops.

It also collaborates with independent software vendors to offer high-speed data transfer, backup as a service and application delivery controller solutions.

First Technology engaged with a property management organisation to assess its cybersecurity maturity. The assessment informed measures to reduce vulnerabilities and help the customer to better understand how to improve its security posture. It also identified employee education opportunities and the customer opted to shift to Microsoft 365 upon renewal.

“Each year changes the way we use technology to access computing in the cloud,” says Meggersee. “The new solutions from Microsoft and our modern services based on the solutions assessments ensures that adopting the cloud becomes very accessible to our customers, regardless of their size or budget.”

First Technology Group has a wealth of Microsoft certifications, including Gold Cloud Platform, Gold Cloud Productivity, Gold Datacenter, Gold Messaging, Gold Enterprise Resource Planning, Gold Application Development, Gold Collaboration and Content, Gold Small and Midmarket Cloud Solutions, Silver Data Analytics, Silver Enterprise Mobility Management, Silver Windows and Devices, and Silver Security.

This is the 17th award that First Technology Group has claimed from Microsoft since 2011, demonstrating the group’s extensive skills and experience, and ability to deliver value-added services for customers.